Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Blank Noise Project

I read about a project on Street Sexual harassment by Jasmeen Patheja. I had to admire this lady from Bangalore, India for the simple reason that she is speaking out.

Reading about the reasons, I felt ashamed to be a male Homo Sapien. Gawking and indecently looking at women are bad enough, but pawing also seems to be common. I just have one word for it - disgusting.

What makes this worse is that people believe that the girl must have invited it by wearing indecent clothes! Can you imagine the gall of it?

I remember a similar opinion when I was at University. There was a movement to ban girls from wearing Jeans and T-Shirts to college as it was against our culture. These "culture police" were the same people who would wear T-Shirts with indecent captions, confuse characters in Mahabharatha and Ramayana (the two mythological epics in Hinduism), would mistreat their parents and drown themselves in alcohol given the opportunity.

The only way to defeat such utter insensitivity is for women to demonstrate they are equal; equal not only in intellect, but also in facing up to problems. Gather sane people, whatever gender they may be and fight. These are not issues to shrink from, as tomorrow our own sisters and wives may be the victims.

Concerned about the recent reports of sexual harassment in the offices of Government of Karnataka we have started a 'Campaign to stop Sexual Harassment of Women in Karnataka State Government offices' Kindly have a look at http://tumkurboy.googlepages.com/ for more information.

We believe small efforts like these will go a long way in improving the rights of some sections of our society, rights that are so easily available to some of us.